Unit Design
I design units that are both compelling and challenging, ensuring they resonate with the diverse cultural perspectives and lived experiences of my students.
Over my decade-long teaching career, I researched and developed 20+ ELA units for grades 9-12 that were widely adopted for departmental use.
Even though I wrote these units for my classroom, I also wrote them with the goal of helping other educators grow their own pedagogical skills. Many of my units were then adopted by other teachers and used as a basis for other departmental curriculum initiatives.
My Approach
My design and development strategies included building scopes and sequences and using Understanding by Design (UbD) and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) frameworks to ensure I created meaningful, effective, and relevant instructional materials that met the needs of all learners. In all of my units, I aim to:
Demonstrate a deep understanding of ELA subject matter and Common Core standards.
Create engaging, culturally responsive, and inclusive educational content.
Prioritize equity and anti-racism principles in curriculum design.
Stay current with best practices through research and professional development.
Examples
Unit Plan: “What is a Monster?”
This is an introductory unit for a year-long ELA course on “monsters.” It blends multimedia pieces with nonfiction articles and more traditional literature focusing on canonical monsters. This unit was broken into different modules: 1) the psychology of monsters, 2) Vampires, 3) Werewolves, and 4) Zombies. Within each of the latter three modules, I began with podcasts on the historical and cultural backgrounds of the monster, then moved on to either a chapter in a classic monster novel or a short story centered on that creature, and then finally, scholarly nonfiction articles on how these monsters came to “exist” (i.e. unknown diseases, societal events, class issues, etc.). One of my goals for this unit was to open students’ eyes to what monsters truly represent, what happened in society to “create” them, and how we can apply our new understandings of these monsters to our own actions and societal contributions. See Unit…
This was created as a foundational unit for a newly formed English 12: College/ Career Writing and Nonfiction course. I was one of the few teachers pioneering this course, which provided me the opportunity to create units on topics that had never been taught before in full. I felt that our Senior students were at the stage in their educational careers where they should be able to independently comprehend and analyze the arguments, speeches, and advertisements they might find going into their post-high school lives. To do this, I included an in-depth study of the rhetorical appeals and multiple logical fallacies and had students apply their newfound critical thinking and rhetorical analysis skills to excerpts from memoirs such as Bossy Pants by Tina Fey and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, various commercials, TEDTalks, and famous historical speeches. Students exited this unit able to write comprehensive rhetorical analysis essays and confidently critically assess the visual and textual arguments they see in everyday life. See Unit…
This unit on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was meant to be used in a standard ELA 11 class as well as a “Monsters” genre literature class. The essential questions for this unit focus on the consequences we potentially face when we don't take responsibility for our actions, the pros and cons of scientific inquiry and advancement, and finally, what makes someone or something “monstrous”. In addition to lending itself to conversations surrounding bioethics and mythology, this unit also allows students to analyze seminal texts such as Paradise Lost and the works of philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau in conjunction with a critical reading of the novel. The thing I love most about this unit is the conversations at the end of the novel regarding who is the true monster (the Creature or Victor Frankenstein himself) and what makes someone or something truly monstrous. Students finish this unit with new thoughts about how our actions affect ourselves, the lives of others, and society as a whole, and they also gain a deeper understanding of the responsibility we have for those we bring into the world. See Unit…